Passport Role Scaled Back

Once a cornerstone of Microsoft’s hosted services strategy, the Passport authentication service has all but disappeared from public presentations and speeches and has undergone no significant development since late 2001. Organizations considering Passport for their Web sites should wait for Microsoft to clarify its plans for the service, and existing partners should not count on long-term support. Although the de-emphasis on Passport could leave room for partners to serve as trust brokers in a decentralized, cross-domain authentication and identity management system, customers may have to wait until Longhorn for this system to emerge.

Role Changed Several Times

Passport’s role has changed several times since Microsoft bought the technology in its 1998 acquisition of Firefly Technologies:

Microsoft sites only. The predominant Passport service, Passport Single Sign-In (SSI), was originally used by Microsoft sites such as Hotmail, MSN, and microsoft.com to perform simple authentication—that is, to enable users to identify themselves to these sites by entering an e-mail address and password. A related service, Passport Express Purchase, allowed users to store information necessary for e-commerce transactions, such as their billing address and credit card numbers, so they wouldn’t have to enter this information multiple times when shopping at Microsoft sites.